Behind the mask.

[reddragdiva]

• In the UK, you can actually bill cold-callers £10/min for calling you, and win before small claims court.

• The Caturday video to beat them all: Russian cat circus.

• skud: No, I still don't want to work for Google.

• RationalWiki: Pigeon chess.

• NewsTechnica: Chuck Norris facts, updated. Yeah, wrote one this year.

• Rocknerd: Party Fears #6 scanned and online; So what was Maxicut?

From Jeeves on RationalWiki: "The Answers Research Journal has really outdone themselves this time. In their determination to figure out how many mammalian 'kinds' there were on the ark, the crack geneticists on staff at AiG turned to the most up to date scientific methodology, using google images and figuring out which animals look kind of similar. The best part? Check out fig. 18. That's a fucking stuffed toy."

Christmas is coming! And oh fuck we're broke. SHINY MODERN LUMPS OF COAL FOR ALL!

arkady has successfully brought the broken cello back to life! And promptly broke the top A string ...

The most exciting thing in my life of late has been moving my assorted sites to new hosting, as we finally abandon the shitty un-upgradeable old box we've been camped out on the past several years. Cheers to hawkeviper and elpenguin. This does mean I will no longer have the root prompt on lemonparty.org. O NOEZ.

Rackspace don't offer an email smarthost, and recommend you smarthost with Sendgrid. Don't bother — the latter uses bureaucracy as protection against possible spammers showing up and will keep you waiting for days. Rackspace just bought Mailgun (and will do a coupon code if you ask) or you can just check your IP isn't in the blackhole lists and see if a test email to GMail works, as I did, and chance it.

(I did manage to break James' previous VM. How to bugger Debian: upgrade udev on a slicehost with unupgradeable kernel. FUCK FUCK FUCK SHIT PISS COCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK. Instead of going through advanced geekly contortions to get it back, we just went "fuckit", declared it "storage" to get the old files off it and pushed a button to create a shiny new Ubuntu 12.04 VM. It's always nice when "KILL IT WITH FIRE" is actually an option.)

rationalwiki.org is ticking along pretty stably now. Ickiest part of administering MediaWiki: fixing broken math display. (Did it, but.) Until the box gets hammered by something and promptly collapses in a heap, like happened this morning. Yeah, best be getting on with making it FastCGI.

I will note that a sysadmin who sets server timezone to anything other than UTC is in a state of sin and must be redeemed by cleansing flame.

Screenshots my dad's way: take a photo of the Skype video screen with his DSLR. With flash.